


Free As a Bird

by bunnoculars



Category: The Beatles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-12 21:50:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13556286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnoculars/pseuds/bunnoculars
Summary: John deals with new beginnings--his marriage to Cyn and peripherally the record deal and the Pete/Ringo drama--and tries to convince himself that they're not the end. Or: in which John projects his insecurities onto all the people in his life, as John would.Also, labeled this as gen because their feelings aren't explicitly presented as romantic, but John/Paul is John/Paul.





	Free As a Bird

Summer has curdled into claustrophobia in the back of the bus and it doesn’t mix well with alcohol, heat closing in on John like a sickly second skin. Like fever where John’s hunched against Paul’s side.

“Drag, that party,” John says stridently, stifled and fighting it.

“You made the most of it, then.” Arch of his brow and John fumbles to explain.

“Entitled to, aren’t I. “ He quirks his eyebrows himself, terse little reaction he can’t help as sarcasm pulls the words out. “While I still got my freedom.”

“Only just,” Paul says officiously, drawing himself up from his slouch, before he deflates with a wide, guileless smile that settles the froth in John’s stomach. “Nah, Cyn’s all right. She’ll let you have your fun.”

“What’s it to her? Never stopped me having it before,” John mutters, and the perversity of it defies shame. “Things change, sometimes, but they stay the same. It’s just, it’s different.”

It’s summertime for Beatles. August has been an ultimatum—Pete gone, Cyn knocked up, George Martin. All John can think to hope is that this is not it.

This is not it.

“Hamburg’s done for you, son. Now you’re always looking to get wild and that—you’ve got people wondering, y’know, you’re a terror,” Paul says, offhand. John digs his elbow into his side, has that much effort to spare; Paul starts, and the quirk of his lips fails disarmingly halfway to a smirk. “Good thing it isn’t fun, marriage. Good and clean, y’know, but.”

He glances at John sidelong, one of those speaking looks that say fuck all.

Nothing has changed but scale, in other words: people have always wondered, and fuck it, let them. John has always had the sack to say fuck you, but it wasn’t till Hamburg that he’s learnt how to mean it and not give a damn. He thinks something broke in his brain somewhere in those years of pills and booze and lunacy, some switch got tripped and now his brain is going the wrong way, only for him it’s the right way. He’s not going back now.

“You can’t find what you’re looking for in ‘people,’ Paul. ‘People’ are a dead fucking end, that’s it. It’s like Elvis. Not Elvis, but. Elvis was in the army, now he’s shit. But they don’t get it, you know, they still think he’s Elvis from before. And I don’t, I’m not gonna pretend. I’m just going, what’s next, you know?”

Paul would get that. Would get that what’s next isn’t what came before. What’s next isn’t marriage, isn’t the pipe and the slippers and John’s problems getting bigger as Cynthia does until everything implodes into mediocrity and mortality nine months from now. What’s next is still out there, the next high, the next gig, the next breath of free air, the verge of something that will finally change things—EMI and London and everything in between that’s waiting to happen. He doesn’t know what is next.

“There’s something,” Paul says, and he’s telling John he’s right; John’s chest seizes in sudden relief, like he’s just got out of something.

“Tell you what, though, wish we could’ve brought us from there back here,” John goes on, bolstered. Paul doesn’t struggle to understand, he just tips him a nod, wise enough to the scene in John’s head that it’s not always relevant, what’s coming out of his mouth. When he’s with Paul, it gets quiet inside him sometimes. He gets free of himself. “We have to get somewhere we can. Or it’s just gonna be the two, the three of us, until we can’t get there ourselves, to ourselves, anymore. ‘People’ can’t help. Just make it worse.”

Paul says, “Tell it, Johnny,” like John is singing their blues and they’re in the steel ribcage of the beast, the system, instead of pissed stupid on the two a.m. back to Allerton. John is charmed beyond his muddled reckoning: Paul is making fun and making something of it, taking John the way only Paul can. John’s grin is thoughtless as second nature; doesn’t even realize it’s on his face till Paul gives him one of his own. Feels nice.

They’re always talking when they’re pissed.

“No, but John,” he says around the smile, leaning in on the wistful moment of confidence. “I think you’re right, you are. Right. I was, I was talking to this girl, and she was. I dunno.”

The sudden closeness steals his wits far more effectively than the booze sodden sponge he used to call a brain.

“Oh talking, is that what the kids are calling it these days?” 

John can assume but tries anyway to remember a girl with Paul; hadn’t seen much of him really, he’d fucked off to the corner with his guitar, been surrounded next time John checked back. So not a girl, just some girl: same difference.

“We didn’t even get that far.” Paul’s confusion plucks at his brow before he catches himself and his expression falls open. “Talking, I mean, but we _did_ y’know, I wasn’t not going to. Wasn’t going to not.” He looks to John for some kind of confirmation, bemused. “We didn’t talk, though. Or at least I can’t remember a thing she said. I think I liked her. But. Sometimes people are, well. Sometimes _I_ get so fucking bored. They’re nice, you’re nice, it’s all nice, and nothing’s going on there. You know?”

John thinks that’s coming down on the wrong side of fair. Talking to Paul itself is unfair, the minute he opens his mouth and. Paul speaks his mind but not the way everyone else does; he gives voice to anything that comes across, strange and beautiful bits of himself he’ll hand over to anyone. Gives that voice.

“That’s you, Paul,” John tries to explain to him, alcohol leading the way with the promise of some kind of coherence. “That’s not what I meant, I think. You can’t put it on the rest of us for being in love with you, even when you’re a cunt you don’t turn it off. Paul McCharmley, ‘n all.”

“You’re not,” Paul says, quick enough that John’s head spins chasing after his words.

“Not what?”

“Not in love with me. Not, you’re not like that.” Paul offers him a nervy little smile sharp enough to stab through whisky. “I mean. You’re always John yourself, so I can be myself, myself. And, like right now. Talking to you is like, it’s going out but it’s going in too. It’s like someone. Something real.”

And there he goes, off on a mystery tour, following Paul through his own confusion, arriving at something before they quite realize it. Truth is an imperfect art, John knows well enough; he’s lived down that rabbit hole himself since he was a lad, both parents gone and meeting himself too young. He understands Paul better than he understands truth, anyway, even when it’s not at all, and his secret selfish side is always working things out for the both of them, bending truths that will probably hurt when they break.

“I’m trying to—I mean: we’ll get there, the two of us will...”

“Somewhere real,” John offers, because he gets it now, just like Paul got him before. They’re saying the same thing.

“You’re gonna have to slow down, though,” Paul says abruptly. He hasn’t changed the subject, but thrown himself into it, flattening John’s moment of clarity. Paul doesn’t bend the truth; John knows he always knows it, just comes down to whether he can tell it to himself. He’s drunk so he’s slow to turn off the lights and pull down the shutters, and so John can watch as Paul vacates his face, retreats tripping over himself to that place inside him John can’t get to. Nostalgia climbs John’s throat, taking brittle hold. “You’ve got Cyn for that now, all of that stuff. And I’ll, we’ll be here for the rest of it.”

The feeling closes like a vice, chokes off his breath and for a minute he wants to struggle like dumb fucking animal. Paul’s eyes draw John a blank. He has to rewind: things are going to change, Paul said. But this thing with Paul, the thing of Paul—he’s not supposed to change things, that isn’t how this is going to work. It won’t work: John couldn’t hold on to both, and he’ll be stuck down here with Cyn while Paul floats off across the universe. 

The bus gutters to another stop; halfway home now and suddenly John doesn’t want to go home, doesn’t want to get off. Just wants to keep on getting nowhere, if that’s all. The bus driver is ruthless and keeps on. Paul keeps on too, unrepentantly easy and beery.

“Don’t forget it was almost you.” The impact of John’s words, snuck out under his nose, hit Paul and him a second late and hard as regret bone deep; Paul’s flinch is compressed into the nervous jerk of his fingers and the tightening of his soft mouth. Tightening of his chest, his breath. John isn’t looking and he can’t say the word. “When Dot—lost the. Lost it.”

“Oh,” punched out in a breath. Paul’s eyes widen and this time when John is looking; it staggers through his whole body as his head snaps up and shoulders hunch forward, and John is startled into meeting his gaze head on. His surprise throws John headlong into discomfort, jams his nerves.

“Didn’t mean it.” John stumbles, because fuck it, on some level he knows he must have, and Paul must know it. “I shouldn’t mean.”

He seesaws, looks to Paul, waits for him to tip him over one way or the other.

“I think that’s when I broke it off with her,” Paul says finally, voice flattened by the enigmatic crushing burden of his words, some part of Paul that had died and John perversely is only getting to know now: the critical dead weight of loss, guilt and relief. John’s heart grinds in reluctant, bitter sympathy, and some part of him is moved to take some of that weight, save Paul that little bit.

“Don’t see how you can say that as you two didn’t finish till this summer,” John tries, bad calculation of drunk and ignorant. Paul pulls a face, yanking his features into some failed approximation of grotesque.

“I don’t know. But I think. That’s when I found out I wasn’t in love with it anymore—her, us, the whole thing. I think I was before, but I don’t know, maybe I never was,” Paul says tightly, as if in pain. “I don’t, I didn’t want to marry her. And that was the end of it.”

John feels caught out, betrayed by all these little parts of Paul that have been twisted and battered living their lives—if he tried to put him back together, it wouldn’t add up to the Paul sung out between them. Paul is the marrying kind, John knows; when he finally gives it up it’ll be for good, slippers and pipe and twenty million kids and nobody in the world for him but his family. But John has always thought that Paul just didn’t realize what marriage could be and couldn’t be. And now John’s faith is shaken, because just as he learns that maybe Paul does know, knows better than him in the end—

John is getting married. John is marrying Cyn and she’s not going to wear one of those stupid gowns but she’s going to be beautiful anyway, his Cyn, and she’s going to look at him and trust him to not fuck this up. He might be a free man still but his baby will have him in chains, he’ll have to go home and look at her and it might be different than it is now. And then the baby. And then.

Things will be different: the simple fact of it poleaxes his stomach, leaves him reeling and dazed, teetering on the edge of brute reaction.

“I loved her, John,” Paul says, pulling John back from himself on borrowed time. He’s staring at him fervidly, blindsided by his own sadness. “Only it didn’t mean anything. I was going to marry her because it was the right thing, with a. With her pregnant and everything. Not because I, not because of anything else.” He looks desperate to make himself understand, and therein make John understand. “And then it wasn’t her or the, the…it coming or not, it was the thing of it. I was more in love with. I wanted to be _me_ , more than any of it.”

He likes to talk truth on general principle, does John, but with Paul he’s never prepared for how brutal honesty can get. He strains desperately to look past Paul’s face as the pressure builds up behind his own eyeballs till his mouth contorts under it, twisted and wrecked as he feels inside. The urge to know explodes in his chest, bursting forced against his ribcage. To feel exactly what is inside Paul, see if what he’s seeing is himself in Paul. Just himself, maybe.

Feel it for Paul and not for him. Because he needs to know before if it’s the same, if he’s getting into the same thing Paul feels like he’s escaped, this dense incomprehensible panic creeping in, hooking screamingly up his spine.

“Do you think,” John begins haltingly.

Paul is still there with him but he’s brusque, matter-of-fact in his dismissal around his raggedy nails. “It’s not the same, John.”

“Isn’t it?” John’s heart has gone mechanical, banging a hollow tin tattoo against his chest. “Let me know, Paul. Don’t be a bastard like you’re always, I already know for God’s sake, so just don’t.”

“No, _you_ don’t,” Paul retorts, perfunctory, no real bite. He draws his hand back from his mouth, examines his cuticles, and then pivots surgical eyes to John. “Everything’s not the same no matter what. You’re not the same as. You’re not me, and Cyn is, you’re both—” Paul sighs in frustration, plastic mask gone awry where his mouth is tiny and wrenched, and John feels his stare drilling into him like trepanning. The panic surges feebly, bleeding out against the vacuum opening up inside him: stasis in crisis, crisis managed ruthlessly to stasis by Paul. He knows now that Paul won’t tell him what he wants because Paul doesn’t give a shit, only wants things for him, not of him. “John, I shouldn’t have to say. You should know it was going to happen someday. You and Cyn, and now. Well. It’ll be good, you’ll see.”

That point isn’t up for debate. John will see. Maybe Paul won’t but John sees, all right.

 

\--

 

“I’d begun to think you’d stay in bed all day,” Mimi says conversationally when John climbs gingerly down the stairs at half twelve, skull hammering a drumbeat out of time with his steps. She’s been sitting there, knitting needles flashing in her hands like a pointed alibi, waiting for him to get up all morning, the spiteful old cow. “I suppose you were out with that girl all night, were you?”

“Missed the happening here, did I? Didn’t know anything went on with you besides other people’s business,” John fires back before he can think, but then the sour contraction of Mimi’s thin mouth brings him thoughtless satisfaction. “She’s got a name, you know, Cynthia.”

“Oh yes, they’ve all got names, she’s no different.” The tart insinuation in her voice rises to bait John is only half aware he laid. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t dignify it.”

John’s mind cringes against the ugly throb of his brain, but the anger cooking up in his gut scales painstakingly up there anyway, takes tight, agonizing hold.

“She’s not one of those girls, and you know it,” John snaps. “Or you’d know it if you made an effort with her. But since you haven’t—you won’t—you know bugger all about—”

“John, really!”

Annoyance bulges out like a brain tumor, eating up his capacity to think, to speak, snapping his nerves. The scene is so familiar, has played out so many times over the years, tragedy then farce and perhaps it’s all the same now: Mimi sniping at him from her armchair and cornering him into things until John’s fucking fit to snap, doesn’t care anymore what they’re fighting about as long as he gets bloody. Cynthia has been a frequent casualty of these arguments since the first time John brought her home, a nice girl with sweet brown eyes and newly blonde hair.

He wrestles the rise in him back down; he can’t stomach another argument when that fight is done, ended this same way last week, when he told Mimi he was marrying Cyn and she told him she’d sooner go to hell than watch him do it.

Mimi reads it in his blanked face, knows for sure he’s given it up when he walks past her into the kitchen.

John waits her out, waits till he’s passed her to let it escape spitefully: “Anyway, I was with Paul.”

Mimi remains disappointingly circumspect, doesn’t follow him into the kitchen, just turns back to her knitting. When John is left alone with himself among the cookery, he wonders if somehow he’s miscalculated. Paul stands next to Cyn in Mimi’s disapproval; his charm has made little inroads with her, and his accent and guitar and drainies, rather less. He hasn’t put a ring on Paul’s finger, sure, but Paul’s put words in his mouth and thoughts in his head and that one single crazy night in Hamburg he put his tongue in John’s mouth and hand down his pants. These things with Paul marked him ways Cyn can’t reach, dug up parts of himself that Mimi has never met, and John the husband, John the father, John the married man, all them, could never be John the way he is with Paul. Mimi is blind if she can’t see that, but then, sometimes John wonders if even Paul can, if anybody can even see him outside himself.

When John gives up on breakfast and comes back into the sitting room Mimi has put her knitting down and her face has been reconfigured into a cryptogram, a study in ambivalence. Her eyes train on him carefully, inscrutably, as if daring him to read her.

“You’ve spoken with Mr. Epstein about all of this? Getting married, and continuing on with the boys, and such.” Mimi’s words are measured out in her voice, will only go so far: they’re clipped and precisely, obscurely inevitable. She searches his face and John isn’t sure what she’s trying to find. “You must have, I suppose.”

John doesn’t know what to make of her, tries to decide if this is about Cyn or Paul, because either way it’s about him on some level but he’s not sure where to stand.

“Yeah, I—Brian is great, he’s, uh. He’s lent us his flat till, y’know. Cyn’s done with it.”

“Has he? That’s quite generous of him.”

“Yes.”

John’s temper spikes resentfully at this pointed blandness, but he bites it back. He’s not going to give ground again here, tell Mimi that Brian saved him from putting Cyn at her mercy, saved John’s pride and Cyn’s peace of mind and them both a whole lot of the pain and anxiety that would have made this marriage too real. Not going to tell her that Brian’s going to be best man, that he’s doing this for him, not Cyn, not the band, that in spite of everything turns out John’s not too proud to let a queer get one over on him.

Mimi’s sigh flares her nostrils and pinches her mouth. It’s a strain, keeping her patience with him: she won’t outlast him. And sure enough.

“You do realize, John, that you’ve put yourself in quite the position, should things continue as they are. I’ve no doubt that Mr. Epstein, and. And Paul. That they mean well. But when the time comes…” Mimi’s voice flatlines, tripping John headlong in the rush of his reaction: she can’t be going there—

“ _When the time comes_. We’ve got a record deal. We’re contracted with EMI,” John retorts rapid fire, and suddenly it’s too much, too vicious an effort to control himself. “Things are different now. Just because nothing’s ever changed round here, don’t put on like you _know_.”

“Oh, don’t be such a child,” Mimi snaps, before she moves visibly to contain herself. “Whatever they’ve been telling you, like as not a record will only take you so far.”

“So what, I can’t get anywhere myself?” John’s pulse is hair-trigger in his veins, pounding in his ears, tripping up his thoughts in coils of ammo ready to fire off.

“Oh, good lord, John! God knows a married man can’t expect to keep on with your life, the way it’s going, like nothing has—”

—like nothing has _changed_ —

“Bit unexpected, this, from the woman who calls Cyn a tramp,” he snarls, before she can get there, beyond making sense of what he’s saying, circuitry between mouth and head fried in the charges of anger jerking through his nerves. “But there you go, you think she’s a sure thing, don’t you, so I should settle for her instead of Paul and—”

“This has never been what I wanted for you, John!” Mimi cries, pushing past the cut of his words, his last best defense, to blow through his building head of smoke. “Since the day that boy came to our doorstep, guitar in hand, clearly out of some, some bloody council estate, asking for you—” Mimi cuts herself short, still trying, takes a deep, earnest breath. “Since Paul, and then the other boys, this Beatles business—that _girl_ —I can’t remember the last time you cared for a word I said. You’ve made your bed yourself; I won’t take responsibility for it.”

Mimi breaks him down before he can shut himself down, makes him feel through his anger some kind of shame, not the brunt of years of disapproval and disappointment that he’s shouldered in defiance, but something huge in its smallness, some poignant and personal ripple of tragedy that hits him like a freight train. 

—Like nothing will change.

“I. You didn’t think we could make it this far,” he mutters in the wake of lengthening pulses of silence, once his heart has ground down to normal time and his thoughts have been jammed back in place, shivved and splintered in the wreckage of his mind. “I’ve, and Paul—I guess we hadn’t thought it out, but. I thought we could go somewhere, all right? And now we both know we can get there, from here.”

Does she want him? Not the lovely boy she and Uncle George raised or the son she’d hoped to have, even the incorruptible idea of John she’d protected from Paul and George, but the John that taught Paul to shoplift and gave George ciggies, picked fights in the schoolyard and drew rude cartoons in class, got called a queer and a ted and a loony and now finally can’t be called anything, now that he’s failed every kind of test that society has put to him.

Does anyone.

“Be that as it may,” Mimi pronounces slowly, calmly, gently even—it’s one final clue and John finally realizes what the cinch in her brow and the somber set of her chin says: pity. “When—if, if the time comes, you have to be able to accept it, and to let go. You’ve a baby on the way—your child—And whatever my feelings about its mother, I won’t have.” Mimi steels herself; the conversation is in this room, no one else between them: motherless child; childless mother. “Not again.”

John is not like Mimi, but he’s not Julia—how she could think. Cyn isn’t like that even if John were, she’s going to be a mother, too sweet not to try, she’ll be good enough that it won’t matter if John isn’t a father. And John, he’s going where Julia couldn’t. He has Paul, doesn’t he.

He still has Paul.

 

\--

 

John is in a foul mood for three reasons:

John was never going to invite Pete to the wedding. He didn’t even think to tell him. That fell to Paul, in one of his late night, hanging off people drunk bits—Paul didn’t like him much, but he’s in love with the whole bloody world when he’s off his head. And even then, Paul had come to him the next day, been tight-lipped and cow-eyed and off, till he figured that John was still on, in spite of him. And Pete still hadn’t been invited, because Pete might’ve been not one of them for years and years, but John sure as hell wasn’t going to humiliate himself in front of just anybody. And, well. Maybe Paul should’ve been cow-eyed over old Pete, with all the shit they’ve put him through since. Maybe John should’ve let him in on the joke for once, this one last time.

He’s thought not to invite Ringo. He met him in gimlet drunken stares in the Kaiserkeller, pushed past all limits and living on a diet of desperately shite sets and syrupy two a.m. ballads, became mates much the same way. He’s going to know him better now because first, George, then Paul and George, then George Martin, and then Ringo. Paul and George and George Martin wanted to get rid of Pete; so did Paul and John. George just wanted Ringo, and then so did Paul, and therefore so did John. Far as John’s concerned Pete didn’t have much to do with it, except in him never having much to do with anything. But Ringo, he knows him inside out and not at all—knows what he’s like out of his mind, shouting demands for slow shit at the wrong end of the crack of dawn, or completely in his head, popping in for a set and fucking around with his drums, maybe five words to spare. But he doesn’t know him in the proper sense, how’s your mum, how’s your dad, how’s your day fucking well going.

All he knows about Ringo right this minute is that Ringo knows fuck all about them and he’s got the goddamn kids in revolt. And thanks to Brian, the whole thing has been taped for posterity, because, well, Beatle business. At least George is the only one to pay in blood so far, because, again, his fucking fault, and John is determined not to get into it, this whole mess. He doesn’t know why the girls have always fixated on Pete, anyway, but then they don’t seem to get much. Just love them to the point of lunacy, to the point they almost hate them; sometimes John forgets who he is, looking down at their faces looking up at him, contorted with brutal ecstasy. At one of them, any of them. Just not Pete anymore, and they won’t have Ringo.

John and Paul hadn’t counted on this when they hunted him down in the Butlins—they’d felt a mythic sense of certainty, like they were on some kind of mission handed down from the highest power they knew and failure meant death. Ringo was bigger than they were, loomed large in the first stolen glimpses of rock ‘n roll they had caught, not a stardusted echo across an ocean—a raw howling cacophony of fucking _noise_ across a crowd choked with sweat and smoke, the kind that made you want to catch up, get there yourself. Make yourself. Al Caldwell was Rory Storm but Rory Storm wasn’t Al Caldwell anymore, he was a goddamn lunatic, felt like some kind of gloriously cheap Jerry Lee Lewis knockoff—he couldn’t play anything for shit, but he had the voice and he lived like crazy—he and his boys were the kind of legend John wanted to believe in so badly it took years before he had any kind of perspective, even when he’d gone and done it for himself. Turned out Ringo Starr behind the beard and the drums was just Richard Starkey, just another guy—turned out he was so nice he was clumsy about it, caved in when he had the upper hand, laughed it off whenever someone had a go, gave away his last ciggies and then begged one back, tried to help his mates up when he was too pissed to even stand. 

John and Paul knew all that when they went up to hunt him down—John still isn’t sure who they were after, the legend or the man behind it, maybe both. Anything that could get them that little bit closer felt like destiny to him—anything that could make the future seem like it was his, somehow, like it would come to him even if he got stranded, left for dead in the doldrums, the slow burning hell of domesticity. He’d wondered if Paul felt the same desperation, pacing Ringo’s sun-bleached room after a sleepless night, feverishly trying to communicate this, to force this sense of inevitability into the open. Wondered if it was catching, if Ringo would crumple like an old umbrella and throw his old mates away for them at the magic words “record deal,” the way they chucked good old Pete at the first sign of trouble. Dead weight is always the first to go, it’s got to go if you’re getting anywhere, and there’s no need to feel bad.

Not that John didn’t feel bad. Doesn’t feel bad. He can’t be Paul.

 

\--

 

“ I like how things are, now. Now is good. Now is fine.”

The edge of the table is digging into John’s cheek and the supple glass of the bottle bites into his fingers like ice—these two points are his only anchors to reality, where reality is turned sideways, Pete a looming sprawl across from him, all soft, sloping jaw and gimlet nostrils, while the room spins on a carousel. He doesn’t think Pete is as far along as he is, doesn’t think he’s been making an effort valiant enough to catch up either. Seems to be the general state of things.

“Are you just doing this just to do it, then?” His own voice slurs and slips away in the ceiling’s drift, and he tries to chase after it, lever himself up and promptly sinks, feeling lost. He tries to enunciate, because somehow this has become important. “Or are you really doing it? Really doing it, I mean. Not just doing it, because.”

“I guess. I dunno. Either one works.” Nothing about that question should be easy but Pete’s laugh just rolls over him. John can tell it’s not getting in there, that a question like that would sooner go up Pete’s nose than through his earholes. “I like being in the band, ‘n all that. Like my drums, like drumming. Being a drummer. Girls, all that.”

John can’t really disagree on those points, even if the world turned upside down and he were looking down on Pete from a thousand miles above, rearranged to fit his idea of reality, not the actual, physical thing of it. But the actual, physical thing of Pete jostles the earth under John’s cheekbone reaching for his beer, arm looming in John’s airspace.

“It’s a laugh, innit, if that’s what you mean. It’s all a laugh at the end of the day,” Pete says, gained some confidence in a couple long swallows. Suddenly John wants to know what his eyes look like when he says this kind of thing, eyeball to eyeball, can only make out the curl of his lashes from here. His nose and forehead bear the brunt of this ambition, crushing against the table in his savage attempt to raise himself up.

“Well, bloody enjoy yourself all right. And I do,” John grinds out nasally. He remembers his arms and gets an elbow on solid, pushes himself up. It never had to be that painful and now he knows. But there’s nothing to see, anyway, and he probably already knew that. Just Pete with some drink in him, staring into his drink. But, “Isn’t there anything…don’t you want anything? Out of all of this? More, I mean. Something. Anything more.”

Pete’s brow scrunches up in confusion and frustration kicks John in the gut, an oblique, crawling emptiness passing in its wake. For this one moment he wishes that he could make sense, that he could talk about the future without feeling like he has to turn himself inside out. 

“Things are good right now,” Pete says slowly, like he’s trying to figure John out. “You’ve got to take things as they come—no use going mad waiting for this or that, I don’t like to feel like I’d go mad over anything.” John’s face must be telling somehow because he frowns, tries to come at it again, like he’s working backwards at math. “Bit of fame would be nice, right? I mean, I don’t care about all that, but it would mean more of everything we’ve got going. That’s not bad. Not a bad break, is it.”

Pete doesn’t get it. He doesn’t see that they’re on the verge of something, that whatever lies ahead is up, up, up beyond what they know, or down in the pits, worse than wherever they came from, because then they have to live with themselves, knowing the end. John doesn’t want to live out dregs of his life. He wants to sublimate, to float among the clouds, count the stars. Breathe the free air, safe knowing that’s all there is. He’s Paul and Paul is him so there’s that. And George will come after them.

“Because I said to Paul the other day, is this it, you know,” even though Pete does not know and he’s just talking to himself, “is this all there is. Or are we going to do it. Get known. Get there. Toppermost of the Poppermost.”

It’s April and the only thing Brian has gotten them is a spit shine. John’s a working man, now, suit and tie and someone else doing his thinking for him, always three steps ahead, not a loser out in the cold, negotiating for every next-to-nothing coming his way, but he’s sick of selling himself to useless, faceless suits turning their nose up, still burning from both ends with the furious desire to do something with himself, be somebody. To be himself, the way he imagines it could be—

“After all this, how could it come to nothing? I knew, the first time we met. How could it not. There’s something. He’s Paul, he’s only ever been Paul to me, but. It should be enough if it’s him.”

His words rattle off the tracks into a wild voiceless realm of trembling certainty, where he’s so sure it hurts, hurts because his mind is only a sanctuary and his eyeballs are pointed out, out so he can see what the world really is, Pete’s slow stupid blink and face collapsed into the limp, lopsided smile that’s rooted into his muscles, his own fingers like sausages coiled uselessly around his drink, muscle memory, just another Saturday lasting into Sunday with the bottle and an easy friend. Only something dawns on John this time, something that makes this feel a little different, like it’s this night, not just another night. Falls on him like a two ton weight in a stooge film. 

Pete is happy.

If the world really did turn upside down right now, John would be a streak across the sky but Pete’ arse would stay nailed to his seat like some kind of freak of nature, nursing his bevvie and watching the clock tick like he’d watch the birds fly.

“John, you okay, mate?” Pete is happy and good lord, he’s concerned about John. His temples feel like they’re clamping down on his brain. Pete laughs and a warm weight claps down on John’s shoulder. Human contact. “You’re cracking up a bit. Now that we’ve got him, let Brian do Brian—you can do John and I can do Pete. Enjoy it, all right? Enjoy it, that’s the thing, what’s the sense if you’re not.”

John peers at him intently across the gulf for a sign that it’s okay to go, finds none and barrels ahead blindly. “I’m trying to do it. I just don’t know what…what John is even.”

“Come off it, man.”

He doesn’t brace himself and Pete’s nervous guffaw buffets him, throws him back on the mercy of his chair. The ceiling is closing in, dancing closer and closer, so John does what he can, gives up and sinks again, into the chair, into the table, into the floor. But now Pete is looking at him, really looking, he can feel bleary eyes slogging across the trench of his eye sockets.

“Sometimes it’s like you’re a spaceman from, from outer space, the way you talk,” he says. “The way I talk. I feel like I’m going to trip over you. Or something.” Pause, and the world shifts again along with Pete. “Not just you.”

Ah, well. Whenever John talks to anyone he’s not the only person in the room. There’re always shades of Paul wherever he goes, whoever he sees.

“It’s because we’re all liars,” and John’s voice is in drift again, off in Pete’s direction but who knows if it’ll land on target. “We don’t know the truth to be telling it.”

“Really, it’s not you. I can have a drink with you,” Pete insists warmly, warm as the hand on his shoulder before. John is swirling down and down and down, but Pete talks in childishly gigantic typeset, the kind where anyone can read between the lines.

“Paul doesn’t have anything with anybody,” John sneers, because the warmth feels colder now, remote, like he’s the moon in the sky and Pete is just reaching out into nothing—he wants to talk about him in the end, does he. John can talk about him, he’ll talk about him, he wants to talk about him, but. Not like. “He does whatever he pleases, does Paul. His dad cuts his hair though. You know. I had to raise him a bit, just to compensate, make him fit for society”—the word rolls around in his mouth before he can spit it out in bits—“but I tell him and he won’t do a thing. How’s that.”

John feels like Paul is coming out all wrong and right at the same time. Pete’s silence spurs him to forget it, to go on bigger, bolder, man on the moon—

“He has to get it right. Anything else, anyone else, it’s nothing— _he_ has to get it. That’s how.” 

This is something Pete can grab onto, like it’s something solid, inconsequential and therefore all-important: Paul messes with Pete’s drums, with Pete’s part, telling him how to do what when, talking to him like he’s just a drum set, just the guy who plays the drums (or not), nothing more to see there, and if there’s one thing Pete can’t.

But—

“He taught me guitar, you know.”

—that wasn’t it. Not what he meant. Not Paul. Not what Paul is to John. Whatever he is, there’s always more.

And if there’s one thing John can’t stand, it’s foolish little tricks like this, a circus of funhouse mirrors keeping you from looking at your own reflection: it’s not that Pete sits back and takes what’s coming to him, sulks behind his drums and smirks at all the little girls, slouches off with his girlfriends when there are no little girls, just red-eyed, red-blooded dirt bags who don’t come up for air all night long, throws them all on Ringo’s kindness when Ringo hasn’t slept long enough to dream for two straight weeks; it’s that Paul tries too hard, that he pushes you and pushes you until he either gets what he wants out of you or you’re shit, someone else’s problem—Paul who prised the bass out of Stu’s cold dead hands and is just waiting to catch Pete out so he can chuck him too. It’s not that Pete sees and wants and feels too little in what they’re doing, it’s that Paul (John) wants too much.

Pete is bullshit.

John tells himself plenty of things to get through it, but it’s never harmless, never mindless, never some little white lie that won’t hurt just anyone, just himself. The truth as he can see it is like a dagger in his gut, twists each time he tries to sneak something by. Truth telling is blood sport but lies are worse—they’re what’ll really kill you. Or maybe him, just him.

And never about Paul. There are a lot of truths about Paul, lots of Pauls refracted off a thousand moments spent together, a thousand moments, some of them so clouded with his own blood he can’t breathe to think of them, a thousand moments and none of them empty like this, useless, forgettable, like this. 

“I learned it from him.” His voice is as sudden and precise as a clap of thunder this time, cutting through to the bottom of his ocean of beer like sonar, and he’s pleased, because if it was important before it feels like life and death now.

Pete has been flapping in the wind skimming the surface, worlds apart. “Thought he joined later, didn’t he?”

“I couldn’t play properly. Banjo chords, that’s it. That’s me. He taught me proper. I dunno how he learned, s’pose through…osmosis or, or something. He says he didn’t know it long when he’d met me, and he was already, he was good. That’s how he’s always been. To me. How he’s been to me. He doesn’t know how to be anything else, that’s the thing. And if he can’t live with something, that’s when you know. Nothing I can do. Nothing for it.”

Long silence. Then signs of life, heaved sigh, clink of the glass, one swallow in a long, smooth pulse. He’s had his beer; it’s what they come for, isn’t it.

“If I keep my end of it, that’s enough, though. Right? To keep this whole thing going. Because that’s what I’ve been doing, and I’ll keep at it.”

The lie doesn’t even hurt this time, that’s the thing. Feels like a favor, feels dirty like only charity can. Maybe John is just full of shit. Maybe. But he thinks he might owe him something out of all this, and after all, he’s not John so it’s probably just fine.

“Yeah, that’s right, son. Pete. All right. It’s better that way.”

 

\--

 

Ringo doesn’t say anything, even when the dust has settled and the stage is stripped, the film crew is gone and the others have fucked off to the dressing room, Paul lured away by the boom of his dad’s voice and the promise of butties, George blinking blood out of his eye, Neil clucking at his elbow, empty except for him and his stubborn set of drums. 

“Neil doesn’t mean anything by it,” John offers, standing awkwardly over him.

Well, then him and the drums and John, nerves racked with tiny explosions of energy and nothing to do, no way to wind himself down except to wait it out. Violence doesn’t make him sick as a rule, but suppose the girls had gone berserk. Suppose they’d gone full on ballistic. Right now he thinks he’d take the rough and tumble in the Kaiser Keller over the bombardment of love and jellybellies at the Cavern—hard to tell which is more vicious these days, the demand to take take take whatever they’ll give them, or the longing to reciprocate. And if Brian (John) has any say, it’s only beginning.

“Give us a hand, will you?” Vague reply comes from behind the bass drum. John doesn’t like to feel like a fool, but Ringo doesn’t mean anything by it—when does he ever? It’s fine.

Silence falls between them as they work, cloaks their limbs and muffles their thoughts, the calm and drowsy kind late afternoon dwells on after everything is out of the way and the only things left are best done in the dark. The awful churning and grinding in John’s system subsides in long moments, dwindles away the more time doesn’t seem to pass, the more it slows to a crawl. When he’s working with his hands he doesn’t have to think. Doesn’t have to say.

His conscience prickles, though, in the close quiet, watching Ringo’s agonizing bemusement, his intent, inert struggle to dismantle his pride and joy without disturbing it in the slightest. John doesn’t think he’s helping in any sense of the word, but when it comes right down to it, this is his fight as well. It makes its own kind of sense that even Pete won’t go away so easily after all—any old cut will bleed days and days later if you pick at the scab. Of course Ringo’s shouldering the fallout, just like Brian dropped the bomb for them, gave them a head start to run for cover. But John knows and it eats at him a bit, that’s something.

John never needs time for anything. He despises time, come to that—despises forgetting, being forgotten, waiting in bitterness for things to fade until even that’s gone and there’s nothing left to feel. If he stares into it long enough, the world stares right back at him. Either you look or you don’t: either it’s your world or it isn’t. Either it’s got something to do with you, or it doesn’t. Pete is finished, even if he’s not. But Neil doesn’t get that, or maybe it’s harder for him since they’d gotten on—Pete’s roots took hold in Neil, one of a couple fifth Beatles with loyalty but no currency. Just his luck. He keeps looking back, does Neil, keeps feeling betrayed when he does, remembering the good times with Pete and his mum, the things they owe them now that can’t be paid back the way he’d like to, no doubt. John says he’s got nothing to do with it, he’s the driver; fine, he’s the driver, he’s got nothing to do with Ringo and his bleeding drums, either. Stalemate.

Ringo doesn’t seem like destiny anymore, now that he’s here. That’s the thing. The differences between him and Pete measure out in small calculable details: Ringo jumps into songs head first but never overplays; can’t keep time but hangs tight, keeps it together somehow; no technique but enough style to make John want to believe, go back to being so young he was stupid with it, spotty, sweaty, scuffling to make some sparks fly. But he can’t, is the point. Rock ‘n roll is his life but it’s also kept him fed and watered, kept him living in the most literal sense possible, and somewhere in those days he played till his fingers bled, till he was hopped up out of his mind just to keep going, till his voice shredded into ribbons over the microphone, till he bled enough and popped enough pills and lit his vocal cords on fire with whiskey and ciggies and endless hours of howling madness and got fucking good, his unsentimental understanding of the real thing approached critical mass. Illusions of invincibility are nice, essential even, but he can see through them: in the end Ringo will do the job, same as Pete.

Still, Ringo has nothing to say for himself, let alone for other people, and right now that counts for something with John.

“You don’t look like much without the beard.” They’re just about done when the words come out easy and abrupt: conversation starter, a kind of odious capitulation to normalcy, but it doesn’t hurt. “Guess Neil knows as much, looking at you now.”

Ringo chuckles. “I can take him, don’t you worry about that. I’m just not bothered.” He tips a glance at John as they stand up, guileless, wide, blue-eyed. “Figured I was getting old enough I didn’t need it anymore, you know. Guess not, eh?”

“You’d just be wasting your time any road—I’m the old man, now.” 

John’s wits are like a rubber band, snapping back into place as soon as he forgets and lets go, and sometimes he fucking hates them. The moment suspends hideously between them, twisting itself around his words. Expectation locks into his spine.

Ringo must know, by now. John’s thought of not telling him, but Paul’s been hanging off him drunk plenty of times and he likes him twenty times better than he ever liked Pete. And George? He grew up sick to death of his mum’s cooking and became invisible when his dad’s bus pulled up; they probably played good cop, bad cop over his marks in school, bribed him with a cheap shiny handful of change when they wanted the house to themselves, bickered over the telly at night. Nothing more natural and routine than the state of holy matrimony—no danger or tragedy there.

“Good on you,” Ringo might say, if he were another George—John isn’t sure, never feels on terms to suss it out, that kind of thing—still only feels like a joke when he’s with Paul. “You must be very happy,” maybe, if he were a bit older, like Brian, well, old and queer and a spectator peering down his nose, free from expectations of his own. “When’s it happening,” that’d be a nightmare—because there’s no sense in one without the other at this time in his life, but what does that mean, the ball and chain he’s getting in a couple of days or the squalling two ton weight lying in ambush down the line.

He’s jolted back to reality by a hand clapping on his shoulder, brief moment of warm pressure, then it’s over.

“It is what it is, Johnny.”

He’s all right, is Ringo.

 

\--

 

For John, peace is sleepy, quiet, close—a place where everything is up to him, and nothing is happening. Want doesn’t turn to need, just nestles in, warm, content, unconcerned with fulfillment. He can linger in the safer parts of his mind, dwell in his dreams for lifetimes without shame squeezing his stomach into a tight fearful ball. Or he can escape through a trapdoor at the base of his skull, down his spinal cord and into his body, empty and fill himself with each breath of his lungs, beat of his heart, twitch of his muscles.

He had been sure that peace wasn’t meant to be shared until he’d gone to his filthy little bed one night in Hamburg, too tired to fight the pills prising his eyes open like white hot tongs, making abortive attempts at tossing and turning and startling each time at the fact that there was another person in his bed, until finally, finally, finally, finally. The first thing he saw on the other side, the next morning (afternoon?), was Cyn’s face. Up this close her brown eyes had been like an ocean, vast, mysterious. He couldn’t have hidden from them but he’d taken refuge in the gentle dark lift of her brow, the brittle tangle of hair floating with each breath, the soft dimple in her cheek when she gave him that secret, unembarrassed smile—and suddenly he’d been fine, thrown the door wide open.

John had been too tired to give her one, too lazy to get up, too reluctant to leave this unexpected sanctuary and show Cynthia the holy hell he’d been in without her, like he’d promised. Just content to snack and daydream and listen to Cyn natter on about the kids back home, feel the crumbs scraping into his skin and the dry, cool press of Cyn’s leg linked with his. They hadn’t talked much, just laid there, scaled up a few plans to fit the new images soaring in John’s head, laughed at some stale jokes they’d saved for each other. When John had rolled out of bed an hour before the show, his heart had plummeted like a stone into the high heels of his boots, and his body was already racked with desperately trivial maladies, excuses: time to wake up and go to school.

Since then, John has always wanted to go back, and he has a few times. They have, rather. He’s never had anyone like Cyn—with Mimi he’s always had something to prove, with Julia, nothing, and somehow that was worse—and when he’s with Paul it’s impossible to sort out who’s who in the kaleidoscope, now shrinking now growing, colors and patterns and shapes winking in and out, endless blur of impressions where John gets greedy just trying to stop, to look, to _see_.

But with Cyn everything can stop. He knows he’s not good enough for her: they both know she’ll never be enough for him. He wants her: she wants him more. She’ll take what he gives her: he’ll give her as much as he humanly can. He’s happy with what he’s got of her, what he has with her: he doesn’t have to hate himself when he’s with her—maybe that’s more a sign than ever that he should, but.

Until.

They haven’t been to bed hardly ever since the engagement, such as it is, so when they go through with it, it feels to John like it’s worth just getting an afternoon to themselves before John has to fuck off to Chester for another night, another show. Now there’s something illicit, dangerous about the way the sheets stick to his skin, the absent glide of her foot against his leg and familiar press of her arm against his. The melt of his bones is slowly solidifying, reconstituted in tacky chunks, even as he tumbles feet first into that halfway state, chasing outlandish certainties into the twilight.

Everything is starting to look like it’ll be okay. If it’s with her, it should be.

“I’ve been doing some thinking on my own, John,” Cyn begins, timidly, slowly sawing through John’s illusions where one good, fell strike would have been better. “What do you think of Julian?”

Reality goes off like a gunshot in John’s ear. Bang bang you’re dead.

 

\--

After a good ten minutes he crushes the smoldering ruin of his ciggie, knuckles scraping against the cool gritty pavement. It’s quiet, still except for the wall at his back reverberating with the call of the wild and Paul’s elbow digging into his arm with banked frustration at his fruitless search for another.

The purge is over and the inferno’s gone out, the smoke is starting to clear and sparks are blinking out, lazy zips of heat dancing in and out of the charred stumps of his ribs. It’s been a long time since John has lost control in such an absolute, complete way, since his he felt this free of everything, reduced to base honesty: his insides are an apocalyptic wasteland and he can see for miles and miles, an endless horizon of nothingness in all directions.

It hurts that he can’t stand to look inward anymore, unless he’s ruined himself enough that he’s no longer afraid of what he’s going to find. Surprise might be nice. He’s just been angry for so long he’s exhausted by it.

“They’re all right, you know,” Paul says distractedly, as if he hadn’t been thinking of what to say that the whole while they’ve sat and smoked and not said anything. John knows him too well, though, caught the furtive flits of his eye, the restless twitch of his fingers as he played with his lighter. “Colin and Don were in my year at school. They’re all right but they’re a bit dim, you see. Things go in and right out, they won’t bother forgetting and all that.”

“I’m not all right, is that it, then?” His voice is dull, sapped of sourness in the time he’s had to prepare and didn’t. “I’m not in a mind to forget.” 

Half a second’s pause and, “It’s little things like this John,” hurls out of Paul like a ricochet, snapping John around to look at him before he can even think better of it. Cautiously he searches Paul’s profile in the dark, takes in the severe slant of his brow and stubborn shadowy turn of his head. Doesn’t know quite what he’s looking for—what to look for. Then Paul sighs, scrubs a hand over his face and there’s nothing to see as usual. “You don’t give up on anything and you’ll wear yourself out, before you’ve even started.” The words aren’t light but they seem to crush John as they come tumbling onto him, so hushed and solemn against the backbeat that feels like a heartbeat, like a whisper in a church. “It’ll be time before you know it. If you remember everything you’ll regret everything, come to that, and then where’ll you end up.”

“I don’t regret things, Paul.” It comes out like whiplash and half a second’s struggle gives lie to his words, but at the same time, at the same time, “Things just are. What can I, if they’re shitty then how is that my problem.”

Paul catches him, of course, catches him and drags him where he can’t walk on his own two feet. “Because you’re making them into things they’re not.”

John sighs explosively, wants to scream and rage all over again but he’s tired, so fucking tired, and there’s this creeping hopeful part of him, grotesque speck of life in the fallout, that still wants to be told he’s wrong, to give up and make himself Paul’s problem. But even crouching in a dirty alleyway, crowned with ghoulish greasy neon light, smoke and sweat hanging about him like a dirty black cloud, legs cramping up and pulse jumping with the pull of nicotine, he’s still the most beautiful and untouchable thing John has ever had.

“You don’t know, man,” he settles for. Weak.

That John can never have.

“I don’t have to,” Paul says impatiently into the dark. “Since you do.”

John is weak, after all, and he can never quite look away, never settle for what he’s got. He doesn’t want to share only the good things, can’t only share the good things, even if that’s what he’s been telling himself ever since he started to look at Paul, to look at him and see into him, that summer he was seventeen. He’s always been a liar—the truth is absolute but it bends and twists and breaks come to that: it’s whatever he believes, whenever he believes it enough. And here, right now, in this dingy no-name alleyway in Chester, he wants everything, anything he can get his hands on—wants to wreck Paul too, if it’s come to that, claw his way up until Paul gets dragged down to his level, wants to break him open and rip everything to shreds if that’s what it takes, until their insides are the same, bombed out and windswept or wide open sky, it’s all the same to him. That’s a fresh hot serving of truth for you.

“Now let things be.” Quieter this time, still firm, like he knows John is listening in spite of himself. “Let it be, keep going. Someday you’re going to look back and laugh.”

“Am I?” John laughs now, comes up his throat like bile, like a sob. “I can’t see a punch line coming out of any of this.”

“And that’s your problem. You aren’t looking for it.”

“Yeah, I can see it now,” John starts, clinging to his sarcasm as his epic sense of tragedy betrays him and self-pity finally surges up his throat, takes hold of his windpipe. “Cyn gets knocked up, kid…Julian…comes along, they need me and I won’t want her or, or him, any of it. And someday I’m supposed to get old and fat enough to realize that it was all a laugh, none of it mattered anyway?”

“And,” Paul demands.

“And,” John falters here.

It’s one thing or the other, isn’t it? He can’t do both and do both well—maybe he can’t do anything. He knows what he wants and he wants with all the fury of his being, but nothing ever comes easy—he knows what he has to lose, too, everything, nothing, he knows and he’s a coward, so the fear cripples him in giant endless waves, fear of being told no, being shunted off to second best, the one who’ll take him, fear of tripping over himself, fear of getting left behind. If he lets that big break fall out of the sky the wait will kill him; if he tries to make it happen with his own two hands he might kill himself before he ever gets there. George Martin is waiting for him with his recording dates and studio space so white and clean it hurts John’s eyes to look at it; Cyn is waiting up for him at Brian’s flat in a sexy nightie, waiting with Julian for the life they’re going to make together; Mimi is waiting for him to grow up, be the kind of man that doesn’t make her shoulders stoop with shame; the Beatles are waiting for him to get a fucking grip and stop ruining nights like this, just another night in the life. All these things falling in and out of line, yanking at him until he’s wrenched apart in every direction, tugging him into so many futures, and he just wishes he had one sure thing in his life. Just one place he knew he could just be, where he could stop and feel the breath come back into his body. And that’s.

And. What?

Paul is not waiting for him to say anything, just sitting there with his knees drawn up, inspecting his fingernails absently; his is the kind of silence that’s studiously not waiting for anything.

“I always knew you were full of it, but there’s got to be a limit somewhere, doesn’t there,” John says gently as he can.

Paul buries his face in the tense fold of his arms so his mouth is hidden but John can see the corner of his eyes crinkle up like an open secret, can hear the upturn in his voice. “I told you, didn’t I.”

Now he wants to talk. “Almost time, isn’t it?” 

“Barely.”

Paul contradicts him without blinking, but they stand together, cold seeping in through the damp backs of their suit jackets and the wet crunch of their boots. Leather had its advantages, but it’s been long enough since the change that they should know better.

“You were right, I’ll give you that. They’re doing our first LP in there, just about,” Paul muses drowsily, peering out into the empty street almost longingly. “We can’t do anything they can’t do—good thing Brian saw you, us, first.”

It takes a second for him to realize what he’s said, a second for John to delight in the absurdity of his mistake before Paul’s features tick in subtle annoyance, then go still. That was Paul for you, when he wasn’t with it.

“You work that out for yourself, did you, Paul?” John doesn’t even bother to hide the suggestion.

“Oh come off it,” Paul snaps, shooting him a knowing look before he gives in and answers John’s smirk with one of his own. “Rough trade, Johnny. That’s all it is.”

“If it’s good enough for him it should be good enough for the rest of you,” John retorts and his insides leap feebly when Paul rewards him with a snigger. Too soon. He clears his throat. “Well then.”

It’s past time, now.

“Some wedding night,” John mutters as he jerks the door open and steps through the crawling black of the entranceway into the dim winking lights and avalanche of noise that greets them, only a long stretch of plaster and then a curtain round the corner to shield them.

“Some wedding night,” Paul agrees from behind him, because when he wants he can still hear him over everything, somehow.

Then they’re on and no one can hear a fucking thing.

 

\--

 

Feels a bit weird hanging about at this own wedding but Cyn’s popped into the lavatory to change out of her suit before they leave, so he’s loafing around outside of Reece’s with George and Brian, no energy left to stave off the misery of small talk, or patience to indulge the farce of dignified silence. 

Paul comes out of the toilets first, out into the open air, says his goodbyes and gives John a cheery smile like the sun has come bursting out of the clouds, and John doesn’t buy it for a second and he can’t believe Paul does either, because where would that leave him, and he’s off before John knows what’s happening.

The sun is shining that day in Liverpool, and Paul is like a bold black stripe against the horizon as he walks off.

“Think I’ll say goodbye to Cyn and then go, yeah, John?”

“If she doesn’t come out in the next five minutes you can have her,” John says without thinking, still intent. “You almost did this morning.”

All that gets out of George is a low laugh, and why not—it’s been a comedy of errors all day, pneumatic drill whining in the background, Brian standing up as his best man and then paying for lunch, eating and laughing and smiling with Cyn at the place Alf and Julia ate and laughed and smiled twenty years ago. George coming forward as the groom was just another sign from above that he’s free to think of this in all bitterness as a cosmic joke.

“Does it start this early?” George mutters, and as sheer incredulity hooks John back to the present, stumbles to explain when he’s probably thought better of it. “You know, what with the. In the loo. You know.”

John gives George half a glance and catches Brian’s vague look of disgust, miniscule crack in his mask of politeness. John only knows because he’s learned the hard way how easy he is to read.

“She brought a change of clothes—flat’s a ways from here,” he says, doesn’t even bother to leave it. Doesn’t say that her suit is already a little uncomfortable, just keeps watching Paul meet that horizon. He knows he’ll turn the corner in half a block, but.

“If you have any problems with anything, do let me know, John.”

Brian this time.

“Don’t see why we should,” John replies distractedly.

Don’t look back, you bastard. Don’t look back.

“Yes, but.” Brian is all delicacy but he’s stubborn about it, drives him to a level of pained, groveling decency that makes John feel like he’s walking on nails sometimes, no right to accept, no right way to refuse. Thanks are in order but they’re so embarrassing it’s just about impossible for him to cross the line and spit them out.

But there’s Cyn at last, at long last, radiant and homely in an old, faded, dress, and there’s George wishing her well and getting a laugh as easy as breathing out of her, and there’s Brian taking him gently by the elbow, steering him aside, taking the words right out of his mouth.

“No, no, that’s quite all right, I didn’t do this for thanks,” he says. He pauses, leans in, forehead wrinkling apologetically under the crisp line of his hair. John thinks that Brian looks a sight smarter than him today, doesn’t have the heart to find amusement in that in spite of everything else. “Just, remember, please. We’ve talked about it and I’m sure you don’t like it, but just once more—everyone who has to know already knows. I need this from you, if you and the boys want to make it.”

A secret, then.

“John!”

Cyn’s voice calling him. John lets Brian think what he wants, leaves him to figure it out, and turns. She’s a foot away from him but over her shoulder Paul is long gone and all that’s left is broad blue sky.

It beckons.


End file.
